


cross-training (it's a dirty little secret)

by gilestel



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: College, Detroit, Gen, Light Angst, M/M, Pole Dancing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 07:41:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8970043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gilestel/pseuds/gilestel
Summary: When Yuuri saw the photos a year later, he wasn’t even surprised.  From the moment he heard the word “dance-off,” he just  knew.  It was almost poetic that the piece of his past he had tried the hardest to bury should be made public in so spectacular a manner.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote half of this at 3am on my phone. Make of that what you will.

It all began after yet another failure in a long string of particularly disastrous practice sessions.  Lately, it seemed to Yuuri that he had spent more time picking himself up  _ off  _ the ice than skating  _ on  _ it; he was flubbing jumps that he had been able to land with ease mere weeks ago, and it felt as though the more time he spent on the ice, the worse he skated.  And to make matters worse, Yuuri’s frustration with his technical failures was spilling over into the quality of his performance.  It felt less like he had hit a plateau and more like he had reached the plateau’s edge and was one step away from careening over into the abyss.  

Yuuri crawled to his feet after yet another failed attempt at a triple Salchow, dusting his palms off on his pants.  Head down, he skated to where Celestino was waving to him at the edge of the rink.  Yuuri knew that his recent performance had been abysmal, and he wasn’t particularly eager to hear whatever fresh criticism awaited him.

Celestino was frowning.  “Yuuri,” he began, voice somber, “I think we need to reconsider your training regimen.”

Yuuri winced, but kept his gaze fixed firmly on the ice, unwilling to meet Celestino’s eyes.  He had a suspicion about what would be coming next.  The possibility had been lingering in the back of his mind for weeks now, ever since his skating had started to deteriorate.  Although three years was a significant amount of time to spend under Celestino’s tutelage, he had really hoped to finish school, or, at the very least, make it to the Grand Prix Series before Celestino realized he was wasting his time—

“Yuuri?  Did you hear me?”

It was quite a few seconds before Yuuri realized that Celestino was still talking, and that the words coming out of his coach’s mouth were not, in fact, “I’ve been considering your progress, or lack thereof, over the past couple of months, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it would no longer be beneficial to either of us for me to continue on as your coach,” but were something else entirely.

“Huh?”  Yuuri looked up, startled. To his surprise,  Celestino looked concerned, but not angry or upset.  “Sorry, Coach Celestino,” he mumbled.  “Could you repeat that, please?”

“I asked, have you tried cross-training?”

“Cross-training?  You mean like learning another sport to improve my skating?”

Celestino nodded enthusiastically.  “Exactly!  Many top athletes will take up a second activity to help improve their performance in their primary sport.”

“Well, I did ballet back in Hasetsu…” Yuuri said.  “My ballet instructor—Minako-sensei—was actually the one who recommended that I start skating.”

“‘Back in Hasetsu,’” Celestino repeated.  “So not anymore?”

Yuuri hesitated.  He thought guiltily of his last visit with Minako-sensei.  He had promised her that he would keep dancing when he left for college, but somehow, between classes and homework and skating, there seemed to be no time left for ballet.  

“I... haven't really had the chance,” he mumbled, carefully not meeting Celestino’s eyes.  Although both Minako-sensei and his coaches at Ice Castle Hasetsu had stressed that a strong classical foundation in ballet was essential for a successful career in figure skating, there was also a little voice in the back of Yuuri's head which reminded him that he had moved halfway around the world to take his skating career seriously, and that any free time not spent on the rink was time wasted.  Judging by the look on Celestino’s face, however, this was not the right response.  

“I'd like for you make time for it,” Celestino said with a frown.  “You shouldn't neglect your off-ice training.”

“Yes, Coach.”  Already, Yuuri’s mind was scrambling to rearrange his schedule.  Midterms were just around the corner and his grades were starting to slip as he put in extra time on the ice to compensate for his recent lackluster performance.  Adding ballet into the mix certainly wouldn’t help.  He’d already had to take one leave of absence because of skating, and it was looking more and more likely that he’d take five years to graduate instead of four.  His parents’ onsen was doing well, but  an extra year of university wouldn’t be a  _ welcome  _ financial burden.

“I'd also like you to try something else, too, in addition to resuming ballet,” Celestino continued, ignoring Yuuri’s inner turmoil.  “You’ve been so focused on skating recently, I think it would be good to try something a little different.  Help clear your head.  Martial arts, maybe.  Or yoga.”

“Martial arts…?”  Yuuri struggled to catch up.  He had briefly tried judo in junior high as part of his school’s physical education requirement.  It had been a thoroughly unpleasant experience.

Celestino shrugged.  “Your university offers fitness classes, right?  Look through the offerings.  Find something new.”  He glanced over towards the other end of the rink.  “Take Phichit with you.  Have some fun.”

Yuuri followed his gaze to where Phichit was running through a routine with a great deal more enthusiasm than Yuuri had been able to muster as of late.  

When Yuuri had discovered that Phichit, who had moved to Detroit from Bangkok at the beginning of the year, would be his new roommate, he wasn’t entirely sure what to make of him.  Phichit was seventeen, and in many ways was Yuuri’s total opposite.  Yuuri had always had quite a great deal of difficulty making friends, and he had largely ignored his previous two roommates.  However, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that he actually quite liked Phichit.  Before Phichit’s last bag was even unpacked, he had dragged Yuuri around the city, a list of tourist attractions in one hand and his phone in the other.  Even though he had only been in Detroit for two weeks, Phichit seemed to be far more knowledgeable than Yuuri, who had lived there for two years, and took great pleasure in firing off trivia about each landmark they visited.

Yuuri had a feeling that Phichit would take to cross-training with similar aplomb.  It was a rather intimidating thought.

Yuuri waited a week and a half to broach the topic with Phichit—ostensibly until midterms were over, but really because the thought of embarrassing himself in front of his roommate  _ and _ an entirely new group of strangers was almost unbearable.  Yuuri had started skating young enough that he had largely avoided the physical awkwardness and self-consciousness that were inevitable parts of starting a new sport.  Haunted still by his abortive attempt at judo, Yuuri found the thought of forcing his body into new and unfamiliar positions was wildly unappealing.   He was almost tempted to ignore Celestino’s recommendation, but couldn’t quite work up the courage to disobey a direct order from his coach.  

Yuuri had, however, joined the university's ballet programme immediately after speaking with Celestino.  He hadn't realized just how much he had missed it until he stepped out onto the marley.  The studio, with its black floor and large mirrors felt like coming home.  As he sank into a  _ plié _ at the barre, arms extending through a  _ port-de-bras _ , Yuuri could feel the tension drain from his limbs.  Here, at least, he was confident and at home in his body.

Nevertheless, a second cross-training activity eluded him.  Yuuri had always preferred to work independently, which ruled out team sports, and he didn't particularly enjoy touching other people, which nixed most of the martial arts clubs.  He lacked the hand-eye coordination for tennis and had no real interest in swimming.  Which left yoga and dance...and Celestino had told him to try something  _ different. _

“Yoga's boring!” Phichit declared decisively when Yuuri finally approached him with his decision, holding up his laptop with the browser open to the university’s fitness offerings.  Phichit looked over the options.  “Are you sure you don't want to do capoeira?”  

Yuuri shook his head and kept scrolling through the list.

“Wait!  Stop!  What’s this?” Phichit demanded, leaning forward over Yuuri’s shoulder for a closer look at the screen.  

Yuuri squinted.  “Pilates?”

“No!  Below that!   _ Pole dancing _ ?!”

“Isn't that what strippers do?” Yuuri asked hesitantly.  It seemed like an odd offering for a college fitness class.

“Americans are so  _ weird _ !”  Phichit said eagerly.  “Let's try it!”

“Wait, what?” Yuuri squeaked.  He could feel his cheeks reddening beneath his glasses.  “No way!”

“It’ll be fun!” Phichit said, reaching past Yuuri to click through to the class schedule, an eager smile upon his face.  “College is the time to try strange new things!”

Already, Yuuri could feel his resolve weakening. 

As usual, he proved to be no match for Phichit’s boundless enthusiasm.  Before the week was out, Yuuri found himself walking through the gym on Phichit's bouncing heels, in search of a room labeled “Dance Studio IV.”  Yuuri had, in the back of his mind, been expecting it to be tucked away in a corner like something shameful.  However, as it turned out, Dance Studio IV was a mere three doors down from Dance Studio I where Yuuri took his ballet classes.  

Like the ballet studio, the walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and a barre wrapped around the circumference of the room.  In fact, Yuuri might have been able to convince himself that this would be no different from any other dance class he had ever taken, had it not been for the poles.  They extended up from the hardwood floor every square meter or so like perverse, gleaming silver trees.  Already, a few were occupied by students.  Some were leaning casually against the poles, loosely holding water bottles as they chatted with their neighbors, while others ran through basic warm-up stretches.  Most of them appeared to be women in their late teens or early twenties—undergraduates, probably, although one woman looked like she might have been a professor.  Yuuri prayed silently that would never have to take her class.  He found that it was easiest to keep his academic and athletic lives as separate as possible.  (Fortunately, he hadn’t yet been unlucky enough to have a professor who was a huge fan of figure skating.)

As the clock at the front of the room ticked closer to five p.m., more students filed in, pulling off sweatshirts and tucking book bags into cubbies by the entrance.  To Yuuri's immense relief, there were a few men amongst the incoming crowd.  Although between ballet and figure skating, Yuuri was used to being one of the only boys in the room, he was eager to avoid anything that would draw extra attention to him in this unfamiliar setting.  Glancing over towards his right, Yuuri noticed (with no small amount of jealousy) that Phichit seemed to have no such concerns, and had enthusiastically engaged the girl next to him in a spirited conversation. Yuuri wasn’t sure whether Phichit knew her or not.  She didn’t look familiar, but despite how much of Phichit’s time was spent on the rink, he somehow seemed to know everyone on campus.

The instructor entered the room at five sharp.  She looked to be in her mid thirties, with her dark hair pulled back in a sharp ponytail and abs that secretly made Yuuri a little jealous.  To his mild surprise, Yuuri recognized her as the instructor of the Zumba class which took over Dance Studio I after Advanced Ballet.  She offered a small smile and a few brief pleasantries to the girls in the front.  Yuuri straightened up as she walked over to the studio’s sound system and plugged in her phone.  He clenched the pole nervously, palms already sweating, as she stared intensely at the screen, presumably scrolling through her song library.  Soon enough, bright, poppy music filled the studio.  

The instructor turned to survey the class.  Her eyes paused briefly on Yuuri and Phichit, but other than that, she didn’t acknowledge their presence.  After all, the course description  _ had  _ said “drop-ins welcome”.

To Yuuri’s complete surprise, the pole dancing class wasn’t a total disaster.  In fact, it was both more and less awful than he had been expecting.  Although Yuuri had predicted that his inexperience would cause him to stick out like a sore thumb, he and Phichit proved to be among the more coordinated students in the class.  It appeared that over a decade on the ice had provided them both with a level of poise and agility that translated seamlessly into this new art.  The basic forms had analogues in skating and ballet, and thus Yuuri found that they came to him with relative ease.  It was second nature to tuck in his tailbone and square his shoulders, to point his feet and extend his legs.

And yet, Yuuri couldn’t help but feel like he was merely going through the motions, performing a crude pantomime of what the instructor demonstrated.  He tried to lose himself in the movements the way he did so effortlessly on the ice or in the ballet studio, but found it impossible to ignore the presence of the pole gliding beneath his palms and between his legs.  

Yuuri found the bald, inescapable symbolism of the pole-as-phallus and the unabashed sensuality of warm, bare skin sliding over metal to be profoundly discomfiting.  Although technically, he was more skilled than most of the other students, their movements, though unpolished, were sexy in a way which felt completely foreign to Yuuri.  In comparison, he felt awkward and immature.  It was as if his inexperience was laid bare before the class, and they could tell with a single glance that he was attempting to imitate something about which he knew nothing, a child playing dress-up in his mother’s heels.

Yuuri's only comfort was that Phichit, at seventeen, was still too innocently boyish to approach anything remotely resembling ”sexy.”  Although he threw himself into the movements with abandon, they lacked sensuality.  However, while Phichit’s failure to achieve sexiness was endearing, Yuuri couldn’t help but feel that his own was merely pathetic.

This awareness made him self-conscious, which in turn made him withdraw from the class even more.  Yuuri continued to allow Phichit to drag him to the studio, but he found that he began to dread the classes more and more each consecutive week.  By the time the semester drew to a close and the onset of finals made it almost impossible to find the time to skate, let alone continue attending pole dancing lessons, Yuuri couldn’t help but feel a weight lift from his shoulders despite the stress of exams.  

To his great surprise, when finals were finally over and Yuuri at long last had to do nothing but focus his attention skating, he discovered that, while he was too overcome by his pole dancing insecurities to put much thought into his skating woes, he had somehow managed successfully work through his plateau.  

But even this realization was not enough to convince Yuuri to continue pole dancing.  When January rolled around and brought with it a new semester and a fresh set of fitness offerings from the university, Yuuri quietly suggested that they try yoga instead.  Phichit, who had been utterly charmed by his recent discovery of acroyoga on Instagram, immediately agreed.  

Thus, their brief foray into pole dancing was, for a time, forgotten.

Occasionally, while waiting for the bus, Yuuri would find his hands taking up a familiar position upon the sign pole.  Mind elsewhere, he’d let his weight shift to his outside hip and let gravity carry him in a lazy loop around the pole, gloves sliding smoothly around the cold metal.  But he’d catch himself and abruptly straighten up, shoving his hands into his pockets.  The pole dancing lessons, for all that they had only lasted two months, felt too much like a dirty little secret to reveal so publicly.  

And a secret they remained, until Yuuri, drunk on adrenaline and too much champagne, felt the weight of Victor’s eyes upon him.  His gaze felt like a challenge, and Yuuri, searching for a way to meet it, alit upon the metal support in the middle of the room.  One of the other skaters was holding onto it in a way that felt startlingly familiar.  Suddenly, Yuuri’s dirty little secret didn’t feel nearly so dirty, and really, why should it even be a secret at all?

Later, as Celestino helped him back to his hotel room, Yuuri draped himself over his coach in a drunken embrace and whispered, words slurred almost beyond recognition, “Thank you Coachhhhh for making me take those lesshhonsss...”  With great effort, his raised his head, looking blearily around for Phichit, so that he could thank him, too.  Unable to spot him (since Phichit hadn’t qualified for the Final), Yuuri let his head slump back down in defeat.  He then promptly passed out, forcing Celesting to carry him out of the elevator and down the hall to his bed.  Celestino, for his part, decided that it really would be better for both of them if they never spoke of it again.

Yuuri woke up the next morning, ragingly hungover, and his dirty little secret was a secret once more.  (But not really.)

When Yuuri saw the photos a year later, he wasn’t even surprised.  From the moment he heard the word “dance-off,” he just  _ knew _ .  It was almost poetic that the piece of his past he had tried the hardest to bury should be made public in so spectacular a manner.  

In a perfect world, Yuuri would have been able to blame it all on Celestino.  Both the lessons and the banquet  _ and  _ the alcohol had, after all, technically been  _ his  _ idea, and blaming his coach for the bizarre and mortifying progression of events leant them legitimacy.  Or, at the very least, made them seem less the result of a series of increasingly questionable choices on Yuuri’s part and more the result of a mature, informed decision.

He couldn’t even blame it on Phichit, even though, like most of Yuuri’s more adventurous college experiences, it had been Phichit who suggested it.  Unfortunately, Phichit was so earnestly enthusiastic about life and so eager to share each and every new experience with the world that it was difficult to stay angry at him for very long.  It wasn’t his fault that Yuuri went along with everything he suggested, even though, somehow, when photos from a raucous night out ended up splashed all over Instagram and Facebook, it was never  _ Phichit _ who ended up tagged in a compromising position with a stranger.  But again, this was hardly Phichit’s fault; Yuuri had never quite gotten the hang of capturing every waking moment with a camera, so by default it was Phichit who documented their adventures via Instagram.  Although Yuuri had made a gallant attempt when he first moved to Detroit (more for his parents’ sake than his own), he was far more likely to forget that his phone existed until it vibrated off his nightstand the next morning under a barrage of notifications.

Of course, Yuuri had a suspicion that Phichit would be more than willing to shoulder his share of the blame in this particular instance; he had, in fact, almost managed to do so at the reception.  When Phichit started to say the words  _ “pole dancing _ ,” Yuuri dove across the table, already a little tipsy, but sober enough to know that whatever followed was not something he wanted his mother to hear.  He managed to wrest the mic from Phichit’s grip before he could reveal any sordid details, but Yuuri was forced to spend the rest of the evening dodging probing questions from curious friends and family.  The questions ranged from the mildly intrigued—“Is that really how you two met?”—to the teasing—“Hey, Yuuri!  Aren’t you going to give us a demonstration?”—to the downright dirty—“I bet Victor gets a private show!”—and Yuuri found himself blushing for reasons which had absolutely nothing with Victor’s hand resting low on his hip.  

But later that night, Victor eventually managed to tempt the full story out of him, and the look on his face, wide-eyed and absolutely free of judgement, made all the teasing worth it. 

“Lessons?”  Victor’s eyebrows shot up dramatically.  He gasped, one hand covering his mouth in faux surprise.

“Don’t look so disappointed,” Yuuri said wryly.

“Ahhh but Yuuri!  I  _ am  _ disappointed!  I thought you were a natural!”

“Sorry to shatter the illusion,” Yuuri said, pulling his husband in for a gentle kiss.  

“Oh well,” Victor sighed, pulling back slightly.  His eyes widened in realization, and he sat up abruptly. He grasped Yuuri's shoulders firmly.  “As your coach, I’m afraid that this means that I’m going to have to change your training regimen for the next season,” he said seriously.

"Huh?" said Yuuri, thrown by the sudden change in topic. 

 “Yes. I really think that you should do some cross-training.”

“Cross-training, huh?” Yuuri replied, a smile starting to spread on his face. His hand reached up to tug lightly on his collar.

“Yes," Victor said, eyes travelling to where Yuuri was slowly loosening the knot of his tie.  "Cross-training. Privately.  For your coach.”

Well, if his coach required it, who was Yuuri to refuse?


End file.
